The Politics o f Aesthetics

The Distribution o f the Sensible

JACQUES RANCIÈRE

Translated with an Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill

A
c ontinuum
 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SEI 7NX,
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York NY 10038

First published in France under the title Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique

et politique
© La Fabrique-Éditions, 2000
© Gabriel Rockhill, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

First published 2004

Reprinted 2005
Paperback edition first published 2006
Reprinted 2006, 2007 (twice), 2008, 2011 (twice)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10: HB: 0-8264-7067-X

PB: 0-8264-8954-0
ISBN 13: HB: 978-0-8264-7067-6
PB: 978-0-8264-8954-8

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Printed and bound in the United States of America
 Contents
Translator’s Preface vi i
The Reconfiguration of Meaning vii

Translator’s Introduction 1
Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Perception 1

The Distribution of the Sensible 7

Foreword 9
The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics 12
Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion
of Modernity 20
Mechanical Arts and the Promotion of the Anonymous 31
Is History a Form of Fiction? 35
On Art and Work 42

Interview for the English Edition 47

The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière
in Interview with Gabriel Rockhill 49
Historical and Hermeneutic Methodology 49
Universality, Historicity, Equality 51
Positive Contradiction 56
Politicized Art 60

Afterword by Slavoj !Zizek 67

The Lesson of Rancière 69

Appendix i Glossary of Technical Terms 80

Appendix ii Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources 94

Notes 102
Index 108
The Distribution o f the Sensible
 Foreword
The following pages respond to a twofold solicitation. At their origin
was a set of questions asked by two young philosophers, Muriel Combes
and Bernard Aspe, for their journal, Alice, and more specifically for the
section entitled ‘The Factory of the Sensible’. This section is concerned
with aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new
modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjec­
tivity. It is within this framework that they interviewed me on the
consequences of my analyses—in Disagreement—of the distribution of
the sensible that is at stake in politics, and thus of a certain aesthetics
of politics. Their questions, prompted as well by a novel reflection on
the major avant-garde theories and experiments concerning the fusion
of art and life, dictate the structure of the present text. At the request
of Eric Hazan and Stéphanie Grégoire, I developed my responses and
clarified their presuppositions [8] as far as possible.4
This particular solicitation is, however, inscribed in a broader
context. The proliferation of voices denouncing the crisis of art or its
fatal capture by discourse, the pervasiveness of the spectacle or the
death of the image, suffice to indicate that a battle fought yesterday
over the promises of emancipation and the illusions and disillu­
sions of history continues today on aesthetic terrain. The trajectory
of Situationist discourse - stemming from an avant-garde artistic
movement in the post-war period, developing into a radical critique of
politics in the 1960s, and absorbed today into the routine of the disen­
chanted discourse that acts as the critical’ stand-in for the existing
order - is undoubtedly symptomatic of the contemporary ebb and
flow of aesthetics and politics, and of the transformations of avant-
garde thinking into nostalgia. It is, however, the work of Jean-François
Lyotard that best marks the way in which ‘aesthetics’ has become, in
the last twenty years, the privileged site where the tradition of critical
thinking has metamorphosed into deliberation on mourning. The
reinterpretation of the Kantian analysis [9] of the sublime introduced
 into the field of art a concept that Kant had located beyond it. It did
this in order to more effectively make art a witness to an encounter
with the unpresentable that cripples all thought, and thereby a witness
for the prosecution against the arrogance of the grand aesthetico-
political endeavour to have ‘thought’ become world’. In this way,
reflection on art became the site where a mise-en-scène of the original
abyss of thought and the disaster of its misrecognition continued after
the proclamation of the end of political utopias. A number of contem­
porary contributions to thinking the disasters of art or the image
convert this fundamental reversal into more mediocre prose.
This familiar landscape of contemporary thought defines the context
in which these questions and answers are inscribed, but it does not
specify their objective. The following responses will not lay claim yet
again, in the face of postmodern disenchantment, to the avant-garde
vocation of art or to the vitality of a modernity that links the conquests
of artistic innovation to the victories of emancipation. These pages do
not have their origin in a desire to take a polemical stance. They are
inscribed in a long-term project that aims at re-establishing a debate’s
conditions of intelligibility. This means, first of all, elaborating the
very meaning of [10] what is designated by the term aesthetics, which
denotes neither art theory in general nor a theory that would consign
art to its effects on sensibility. Aesthetics refers to a specific regime for
identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between
ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and
possible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposes
a certain idea of thought’s effectivity). Defining the connections within
this aesthetic regime of the arts, the possibilities that they determine,
and their modes of transformation, such is the present objective of
my research and of a seminar held over the past few years within the
framework provided by the University of Paris-VIII and the Collège
International de Philosophie. The results of this research will not be
found in the present work; their elaboration will follow its own proper
pace. I have nevertheless attempted to indicate a few historical and
conceptual reference points appropriate for reformulating certain
problems that have been irremediably confused by notions that pass off
conceptual prejudices as historical determinations and temporal delim­
itations as conceptual determinations. Among the foremost of these
notions figures, of course, the concept of modernity, today the source
of all the jumbled miscellany that arbitrarily sweeps [11] together such
figures as Hölderlin, Cézanne, Mallarmé, Malevich, or Duchamp into
a vast whirlwind where Cartesian science gets mixed up with revolu­
tionary parricide, the age of the masses with Romantic irrationalism,
the ban on representation with the techniques of mechanized repro­
duction, the Kantian sublime with the Freudian primal scene, the flight
of the gods with the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Indicating
the general lack of evidence supporting these notions obviously does
not entail adhering to the contemporary discourses on the return to
the simple reality of artistic practices and its criteria of assessment. The
connection between these ‘simple practices’ and modes of discourse,
forms of life, conceptions of thought, and figures of the community
is not the fruit of a maleficent misappropriation. On the contrary, the
effort to think through this connection requires forsaking the unsat­
isfactory mise-en-scène of the end’ and the ‘return that persistently
occupies the terrain of art, politics, and any other object of thought.
[12]
 The Distribution o f the Sensible: Politics
and Aesthetics
In Disagreement, politics is examined from the perspective o f what you
call the ‘distribution o f th e sensible\ In you r opinion, does this expression
provide the key to the necessary ju n ction between aesthetic practices and
political practices?

I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts

of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of
something in common and the delimitations that define the respective
parts and positions within it.5 A distribution of the sensible therefore
establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared
and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based
on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that deter­
mines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to
participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this
distribution. Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a pa rt
in the act of governing and being governed. However, another form of
distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distri­
bution that [13] determines those who have a part in the community
of citizens. A speaking being, according to Aristotle, is a political
being. If a slave understands the language of its rulers, however, he
does not ‘possess’ it. Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge
of the shared or common elements of the community because they do
not have th e tim e to devote themselves to anything other than their
work. They cannot be som ewhere else because work w ill not wait. The
distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is
common to the community based on what they do and on the time
and space in which this activity is performed. Having a particular
‘occupation’ thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge
of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not
in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. There is
thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with
Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to
the age of the masses’. This aesthetics should not be understood as
the perverse commandeering of politics by a will to art, by a consid­
eration of the people qua work of art. If the reader is fond of analogy,
aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense - re-examined perhaps
by Foucault - as the system of a priori forms determining what presents
itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of [14] spaces and times,
of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously
determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.
Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it,
around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the
properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.
It is on the basis of this primary aesthetics that it is possible to raise
the question o f‘aesthetic practices’ as I understand them, that is forms
of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what
they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the
community. Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that
intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as
well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms
of visibility. The Platonic proscription of the poets is based on the
impossibility of doing two things at once prior to being based on the
immoral content of fables. The question of fiction is first a question
regarding the distribution of places. From the Platonic point of view,
the stage, which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the
exhibition-space for ‘fantasies’, disturbs the clear partition of identities,
activities, and spaces. The same is true of [15] writing. By stealing away
to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to
speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circu­
lation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language
and the positions of bodies in shared space. Plato thereby singles out
two main models, two major forms of existence and of the sensible
effectivity of language - writing and the theatre - , which are also
structure-giving forms for the regime of the arts in general. However,
these forms turn out to be prejudicially linked from the outset to a
certain regime of politics, a regime based on the indetermination of
 identities, the delegitimation of positions of speech, the deregulation
of partitions of space and time. This aesthetic regime of politics is
strictly identical with the regime of democracy, the regime based on
the assembly of artisans, inviolable written laws, and the theatre as
institution. Plato contrasts a third, good form o f a rt with writing and
the theatre, the choreographic form of the community that sings and
dances its own proper unity. In sum, Plato singles out three ways in
which discursive and bodily practices suggest forms of community:
the surface of mute signs that are, he says, [16] like paintings, and
the space of bodily movement that divides itself into two antagonistic
models (the movement of simulacra on the stage that is offered as
material for the audiences identifications and, on the other hand, the
authentic movement characteristic of communal bodies).
Here we have three ways of distributing the sensible that structure
the manner in which the arts can be perceived and thought of as forms
of art and as forms that inscribe a sense of community: the surface
of ‘depicted’ signs, the split reality of the theatre, the rhythm of a
dancing chorus. These forms define the way in which works of art or
performances are ‘involved in politics’, whatever may otherwise be the
guiding intentions, artists’ social modes of integration, or the manner
in which artistic forms reflect social structures or movements. When
Madame Bovary was published, or Sentimental Education, these works
were immediately perceived as ‘democracy in literature’ despite Flaubert’s
aristocratic situation and political conformism. His very refusal to
entrust literature with any message whatsoever was considered to be
evidence of democratic equality. His adversaries claimed that he was [17]
democratic due to his decision to depict and portray instead of instruct.
This equality of indifference is the result of a poetic bias: the equality
of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity
between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this
indifference after all if not the very equality of everything that comes to
pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes? This equality
destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a
community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community
formed only by the random circulation of the written word.
In this way, a sensible politicity exists that is immediately attributed
to the major forms of aesthetic distribution such as the theatre, the
 page, or the chorus. These ‘politics’ obey their own proper logic, and
they offer their services in very different contexts and time periods.
Consider the way these paradigms functioned in the connection
between art and politics at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth. Consider, for example, the role taken on
by the paradigm of the page in all its different forms, which exceed
the materiality of a written sheet of paper. Novelistic democracy, on
the one hand, is the indifferent democracy of writing such as [18] it is
symbolized by the novel and its readership. There is also, however, the
knowledge concerning typography and iconography, the intertwining
of graphic and pictorial capabilities, that played such an important
role in the Renaissance and was revived by Romantic typography
through its use of vignettes, culs-de-lampe, and various innovations.
This model disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative logic that
establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the
sayable and the visible. It also disturbs the clear partition between
works of pure art and the ornaments made by the decorative arts.
This is why it played such an important - and generally underesti­
mated - role in the upheaval of the representative paradigm and of its
political implications. I am thinking in particular of its role in the Arts
and Crafts movement and all of its derivatives (Art Deco, Bauhaus,
Constructivism). These movements developed an idea of furniture - in
the broad sense of the term - for a new community, which also inspired
a new idea of pictorial surface as a surface of shared writing.
Modernist discourse presents the revolution of pictorial abstraction
as painting’s discovery of its own proper medium’: two-dimensional
surface. By revoking the perspectivist illusion of the third dimension,
painting was to regain [19] the mastery of its own proper surface. In
actual fact, however, this surface does not have any distinctive feature.
A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain
distribution of the sensible. For Plato, writing and painting were equiv­
alent surfaces of mute signs, deprived of the breath that animates and
transports living speech. Flat surfaces, in this logic, are not opposed
to depth in the sense of three-dimensional surfaces. They are opposed
to the ‘living’. The mute surface of depicted signs stands in opposition
to the act of ‘living’ speech, which is guided by the speaker towards
its appropriate addressee. Moreover, painting’s adoption of the third
 dimension was also a response to this distribution. The reproduction
of optical depth was linked to the privilege accorded to the story. In the
Renaissance, the reproduction of three-dimensional space was involved
in the valorization of painting and the assertion of its ability to capture
an act of living speech, the decisive moment of action and meaning. In
opposition to the Platonic degradation of mimesis, the classical poetics
of representation wanted to endow the ‘flat surface’ with speech or with
a ‘scene’ of life, with a specific depth such as the manifestation of an
action, the expression of an interiority, or the transmission of meaning.
Classical poetics established [20] a relationship of correspondence at
a distance between speech and painting, between the sayable and the
visible, which gave ‘imitation’ its own specific space.
It is this relationship that is at stake in the supposed distinction
between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space as ‘specific’
to a particular form of art. To a large extent, the ground was laid for
painting’s ‘anti-representative revolution’ by the flat surface of the
page, in the change in how literature’s ‘images’ function or the change
in the discourse on painting, but also in the ways in which typog­
raphy, posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced. The type
of painting that is poorly named abstract, and which is supposedly
brought back to its own proper medium, is implicated in an overall
vision of a new human being lodged in new structures, surrounded by
different objects. Its flatness is linked to the flatness of pages, posters,
and tapestries. It is the flatness of an interface. Moreover, its anti-repre-
sentative ‘purity’ is inscribed in a context where pure art and decorative
art are intertwined, a context that straight away gives it a political
signification. This context is not the surrounding revolutionary fever
that made Malevich at once the artist who painted Black Square and
the revolutionary eulogist of [21] ‘new forms of life’. Furthermore,
this is not some theatrical ideal of the new human being that seals
the momentary alliance between revolutionary artists and politics.
It is initially in the interface created between different ‘mediums’
- in the connections forged between poems and their typography or
their illustrations, between the theatre and its set designers or poster
designers, between decorative objects and poems - that this ‘newness’
is formed that links the artist who abolishes figurative representation
to the revolutionary who invents a new form of life. This interface is
 political in that it revokes the twofold politics inherent in the logic
of representation. On the one hand, this logic separated the world
of artistic imitations from the world of vital concerns and politico-
social grandeur. On the other hand, its hierarchical organization - in
particular the primacy of living speech/action over depicted images -
formed an analogy with the socio-political order. With the triumph of
the novels page over the theatrical stage, the egalitarian intertwining
of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces, the elevation
of artisans’ art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art
into the décor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution
of sensory experience was overturned.
[22] This is how the ‘planarity’ of the surface of depicted signs, the
form of egalitarian distribution of the sensible stigmatized by Plato,
intervened as the principle behind an art’s ‘formal’ revolution at the
same time as the principle behind the political redistribution of shared
experience. The other major forms, among which there are those of the
chorus and the theatre that I mentioned earlier, could be considered in
much the same way. A history of aesthetic politics, understood in this
sense, has to take into account the way in which these major forms
stand in opposition to one another or intermingle. I am thinking,
for example, of the way in which this paradigm of the surface of
signs/forms entered into conflict or joined forces with the theatrical
paradigm of presence, and with the diverse forms that this paradigm
itself has taken on, from the Symbolist figuration of a collective legend
to the actualized chorus of a new humanity. Politics plays itself out
in the theatrical paradigm as the relationship between the stage and
the audience, as meaning produced by the actor’s body, as games of
proximity or distance. Mallarmé’s critical prose writings stage, in an
exemplary manner, the play of cross-references, oppositions or assimi­
lations between these forms, from the intimate theatre of the page or
calligraphic choreography to the new ‘service’ performed by concerts.
[23] In one respect, these forms therefore appear to bring forth,
in very different contexts, figures of community equal to themselves.
However, they are susceptible to being assigned to contradictory political
paradigms. Let us take the example of the tragic stage. It simultan­
eously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy
and the power of illusion. By isolating mimesis in its own proper space
and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle - even if
this was not his intention - redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in
the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become
the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy
of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of
speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a
monarchical paradigm. Let us also consider the long and contradictory
history of rhetoric and the model of the £good orator. Throughout the
monarchical age, democratic eloquence à la Demosthenes denoted an
excellence in speaking, which was itself established as the imaginary
attribute of the supreme power. It was also always receptive, however,
to the recovery of its democratic function by lending its [24] canonical
forms and its consecrated images to the transgressive appearance of
unauthorized speakers on the public stage. Let us consider as well the
contradictory destinies of the choreographic model. Recent research
has evoked the metamorphoses undergone by Labans notation of
movement. It was developed in a context favouring the liberation
of bodies and became the model for the large Nazi demonstrations
before regaining, in the anti-establishment context of performance
art, a new subversive virginity. Benjamins explanation via the fatal
aestheticization of politics in the era of the masses’ overlooks, perhaps,
the long-standing connection between the unanimous consensus of
the citizenry and the exaltation of the free movement of bodies. In
a city hostile to the theatre and to written law, Plato recommended
constantly cradling unweaned infants.
I have evoked these three forms because Plato conceptually charted
them out and because they maintain a historical constancy. They
obviously do not define all of the ways that figures of community
are aesthetically designed. The important thing is that the question
of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this
level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to
the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.
[25] It is from this perspective that it is possible to reflect on artists’
political interventions, starting with the Romantic literary forms that
aimed at deciphering society, the Symbolist poetics of dreams or the
Dadaist or Constructivist elimination of art, and continuing up to
the contemporary modes of performance and installation. From this
perspective, it is possible to challenge a good many imaginary stories
about artistic ‘modernity’ and vain debates over the autonomy of art
or its submission to politics. The arts only ever lend to projects of
domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that
is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily
positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the
visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or
the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation.
Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings o f
the Notion o f Modernity
Certain o f the most fu ndam ental categories used fo r thinking about artistic
creation in the twentieth century, namely the categories o f modernity, the
avant-garde and, fo r some time now, postm odernity, also happen to have
a political m eaning Do these categories seem to you to have the slightest
interest fo r conceiving, in precise terms, what ties ‘a esthetics’ to ‘p olitics’?

I do not think that the notions of modernity and the avant-garde have
been very enlightening when it comes to thinking about the new forms
of art that have emerged since the last century or the relations between
aesthetics and politics. They actually confuse two very different
things: the historicity specific to a regime of the arts in general and
the decisions to break with the past or anticipate the future that take
place within this regime. The notion of aesthetic modernity conceals -
without conceptualizing it in the least - the singularity of a particular
regime of the arts, that is [27] to say of a specific type of connection
between ways of producing works of art or developing practices, forms
of visibility that disclose them, and ways of conceptualizing the former
and the latter.
A detour is necessary here in order to clarify this notion and situate
the problem. With regard to what we call art, it is in fact possible
to distinguish, within the Western tradition, three major regimes of
identification. There is first of all what I propose to call an ethical
regime of images. In this regime, art’ is not identified as such but is
subsumed under the question of images. As a specific type of entity,
images are the object of a twofold question: the question of their origin
(and consequently their truth content) and the question of their end
or purpose, the uses they are put to and the effects they result in. The
question of images of the divine and the right to produce such images
or the ban placed on them falls within this regime, as well as the
 question of the status and signification of the images produced. The
entire Platonic polemic against the simulacra of painting, poems, and
the stage also falls within this regime.6 Plato does not, as it is often
claimed, place art under the yoke of politics. This very distinction
would have made no sense for Plato since art did not exist for [28] him
but only arts, ways of doing and making. And it is among these that
he traces the dividing line: there are true arts, that is to say forms of
knowledge based on the imitation of a model with precise ends, and
artistic simulacra that imitate simple appearances. These imitations,
differentiated by their origin, are then distinguished by their end or
purpose, by the way in which the poem’s images provide the spectators,
both children and adult citizens, with a certain education and fit in
with the distribution of the city’s occupations. It is in this sense that
I speak of an ethical regime of images. In this regime, it is a matter
of knowing in what way images’ mode of being affects the ethos, the
mode of being of individuals and communities. This question prevents
art’ from individualizing itself as such.7
The poetic - or representative - regime of the arts breaks away from
the ethical regime of images. It identifies the substance of art - or
rather of the arts - in the couple poieis!m im esis. The mimetic principle
is not at its core a normative principle stating that art must make
copies resembling their models. It is first of all a pragmatic principle
that isolates, within the general domain of the arts (ways of doing and
making), certain particular forms of art that produce specific entities
[29] called imitations. These imitations are extricated, at one and the
same time, from the ordinary control of artistic products by their use
and from the legislative reign of truth over discourses and images.
Such is the vast operation carried out by the Aristotelian elaboration of
m im esisz n à b y the privilege accorded to tragic action. It is the substance
of the poem, the fabrication of a plot arranging actions that represent
the activities of men, which is the foremost issue, to the detriment of
the essence of the image, a copy examined with regard to its model. Such
is the principle guiding the functional change in the theatrical model
I was speaking of earlier. The principle regulating the external delimi­
tation of a well-founded domain of imitations is thus at the same time
a normative principle of inclusion. It develops into forms of norma-
tivity that define the conditions according to which imitations can be
 recognized as exclusively belonging to an art and assessed, within this
framework, as good or bad, adequate or inadequate: partitions between
the representable and the unrepresentable; the distinction between
genres according to what is represented; principles for adapting forms
of expression to genres and thus to the subject matter represented; the
distribution of resemblances [30] according to principles of verisimil­
itude, appropriateness, or correspondence; criteria for distinguishing
between and comparing the arts; etc.
I call this regime p oetic in the sense that it identifies the arts - what
the Classical Age would later call the ‘fine arts’ - within a classification
of ways of doing and making, and it consequently defines proper ways
of doing and making as well as means of assessing imitations. I call
it representative insofar as it is the notion of representation or mimesis
that organizes these ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging. Once
again, however, mimesis is not the law that brings the arts under the
yoke of resemblance. It is first of all a fold in the distribution of ways of
doing and making as well as in social occupations, a fold that renders
the arts visible. It is not an artistic process but a regime of visibility
regarding the arts. A regime of visibility is at once what renders the
arts autonomous and also what links this autonomy to a general order
of occupations and ways of doing and making. This is what I evoked
earlier concerning the logic of representation, which enters into a
relationship of global analogy with an overall hierarchy of political
and social occupations. The representative primacy of action over
characters or of narration over [31] description, the hierarchy of genres
according to the dignity of their subject matter, and the very primacy
of the art of speaking, of speech in actuality, all of these elements figure
into an analogy with a fully hierarchical vision of the community.
The aesthetic regime of the arts stands in contrast with the repre­
sentative regime. I call this regime aesthetic because the identification
of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making,
but it is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to
artistic products. The word aesthetics does not refer to a theory of
sensibility, taste, and pleasure for art amateurs. It strictly refers to the
specific mode of being of whatever falls within the domain of art, to
the mode of being of the objects of art. In the aesthetic regime, artistic
phenomena are identified by their adherence to a specific regime of
the sensible, which is extricated from its ordinary connections and is
inhabited by a heterogeneous power, the power of a form of thought
that has become foreign to itself: a product identical with something
not produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, logos
identical with pathos, the intention of the unintentional, etc. This idea
of a regime of the sensible that has become foreign to itself, the locus
for a form of thought that has become foreign to itself, is the invariable
core in the [32] identifications of art that have configured the aesthetic
mode of thought from the outset: Vico’s discovery of the ‘true Homer’
as a poet in spite of himself, Kantian genius’ that is unaware of the law
it produces, Schiller’s ‘aesthetic state’ that suspends both the activity of
the understanding and sensible passivity, Schelling’s definition of art as
the identity between a conscious process and an unconscious process,
etc. The aesthetic mode of thought likewise runs through the specific
definitions that the arts have given to themselves in the Modern Age:
Proust’s idea of a book that would be entirely planned out and fully
removed from the realm of the will; Mallarmé’s idea of a poem by the
spectator-poet, written ‘without the scribe’s apparatus’ by the steps
of an illiterate dancer; the Surrealist practice of producing work that
expresses the artist’s unconscious with the outdated illustrations in
catalogues or newspaper serials from the previous century; Bresson’s
idea of film as the film-maker’s thought withdrawn from the body of
the ‘models’ who, by unthinkingly repeating the words and gestures
he lays down for them, manifest their proper truth without either the
film-maker or the models knowing it; etc.
It is pointless to go on with definitions and examples. We need
to indicate, on the contrary, the heart of the problem. The aesthetic
regime [33] of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the
singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of
the arts, subject matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the
mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated
with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated
its rules from the order of social occupations. The aesthetic regime
asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys
any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously
establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the
forms that life uses to shape itself. Schiller’s aesthetic state, which is this
 regimes first manifesto (and remains, in a sense, unsurpassable), clearly
indicates this fundamental identity of opposites. The aesthetic state is
a pure instance of suspension, a moment when form is experienced for
itself. Moreover, it is the moment of the formation and education of a
specific type of humanity.
From this perspective, it is possible to understand the functions
served by the notion of modernity. The aesthetic regime of the arts, it
can be said, is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent
label ‘modernity’. However, ‘modernity’ is more than an incoherent
label. It is, in its different versions, the concept that diligently works
at [34] masking the specificity of this regime of the arts and the very
meaning of the specificity of regimes of art. It traces, in order either
to exalt or deplore it, a simple line of transition or rupture between
the old and the new, the representative and the non-representative or
the anti-representative. The basis for this simplistic historical account
was the transition to non-figurative representation in painting. This
transition was theorized by being cursorily assimilated into artistic
‘modernity’s’ overall anti-mimetic destiny. When the eulogists of this
form of modernity saw the exhibition-spaces for the well-behaved
destiny of modernity invaded by all kinds of objects, machines, and
unidentified devices, they began denouncing the ‘tradition of the new’,
a desire for innovation that would reduce artistic modernity to the
emptiness of its self-declaration. However, it is the starting point that
is erroneous. The leap outside of mimesis is by no means the refusal of
figurative representation. Furthermore, its inaugural moment has often
been called realism, which does not in any way mean the valorization
of resemblance but rather the destruction of the structures within
which it functioned. Thus, novelistic realism is first of all the reversal
of the hierarchies of representation (the primacy of the narrative over
the descriptive [35] or the hierarchy of subject matter) and the adoption
of a fragmented or proximate mode of focalization, which imposes raw
presence to the detriment of the rational sequences of the story. The
aesthetic regime of the arts does not contrast the old with the new. It
contrasts, more profoundly, two regimes of historicity. It is within the
mimetic regime that the old stands in contrast with the new. In the
aesthetic regime of art, the future of art, its separation from the present
of non-art, incessantly restages the past.
 Those who exalt or denounce the ‘tradition of the new’ actually
forget that this tradition has as its strict complement the newness
of the tradition. The aesthetic regime of the arts did not begin with
decisions to initiate an artistic rupture. It began with decisions to
reinterpret what makes art or what art makes: Vico discovering the
‘true Homer, that is to say not an inventor of fables and characters but
a witness to the image-laden language and thought of ancient times;
Hegel indicating the true subject matter of Dutch genre painting: not
in stories or descriptions of interiors but a nations freedom displayed in
reflections of light; Hölderlin reinventing Greek tragedy; Balzac [36]
contrasting the poetry of the geologist who reconstructs worlds out
of tracks and fossils with the poetry that makes do with reproducing
a bit of agitation in the soul; Mendelssohn replaying the St. M atthew
Passion\ etc. The aesthetic regime of the arts is first of all a new regime
for relating to the past. It actually sets up as the very principle of
artisticity the expressive relationship inherent in a time and a state
of civilization, a relationship that was previously considered to be the
‘non-artistic’ part of works of art (the part that was excused by invoking
the crudeness of the times when the author lived). The aesthetic regime
of the arts invents its revolutions on the basis of the same idea that
caused it to invent the museum and art history, the notion of classicism
and new forms of reproduction... And it devotes itself to the invention
of new forms of life on the basis of an idea of what art was, an idea of
what art w ould have been. When the Futurists or the Constructivists
declared the end of art and the identification of its practices with the
practices that construct, decorate, or give a certain rhythm to the times
and spaces of communal life, they proposed an end of art equivalent to
the identification of art with the life of the community. This proposal
is directly dependent on the Schillerian and Romantic reinterpretation
of Greek art as a community’s mode of life, while also communicating,
[37] in other respects, with the new styles introduced by the inventors
of advertising who, for their part, did not propose a revolution but
only a new way of living amongst words, images, and commodities.
The idea of modernity is a questionable notion that tries to make clear-
cut distinctions in the complex configuration of the aesthetic regime
of the arts. It tries to retain the forms of rupture, the iconoclastic
gestures, etc., by separating them from the context that allows for their
existence: history, interpretation, patrimony, the museum, the perva­
siveness of reproduction... The idea of modernity would like there to
be only one meaning and direction in history, whereas the temporality
specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heteroge­
neous temporalities.
The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately
invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of
art and its relationships with the other spheres of collective experience.
The confusion introduced by this notion has, it seems to me, two
major forms. Both of them, without analysing it, rely on the contra­
diction constitutive of the aesthetic regime of the arts, which makes art
into an autonomous form o f life and thereby sets down, at one and the
same time, the autonomy of art and its identification with a moment
in life’s process of self-formation. The two [38] major variants of the
discourse on ‘modernity’ derive from this contradiction. The first
variant would have modernity identified simply with the autonomy
of art, an ‘anti-mimetic’ revolution in art identical with the conquest
of the pure form of art finally laid bare. Each individual art would
thus assert the pure potential of art by exploring the capabilities of
its specific medium. Poetic or literary modernity would explore the
capabilities of a language diverted from its communicational uses.
Pictorial modernity would bring painting back to its distinctive feature:
coloured pigment and a two-dimensional surface. Musical modernity
would be identified with the language of twelve sounds, set free from
any analogy with expressive language, etc. Furthermore, these specific
forms of modernity would be in a relationship of distant analogy with
a political modernity susceptible to being identified, depending on the
time period, with revolutionary radicality or with the sober and disen­
chanted modernity of good republican government. The main feature
of what is called the ‘crisis of art’ is the overwhelming defeat of this
simple modernist paradigm, which is forever more distant from the
mixtures of genres and mediums as well as from the numerous political
possibilities inherent in the arts’ contemporary forms. [39]
This overwhelming defeat is obviously overdetermined by the
modernist paradigm’s second major form, which might be called
modernatism. I mean by this the identification of forms from the
aesthetic regime of the arts with forms that accomplish a task or fulfil
 a destiny specific to modernity. At the root of this identification there
is a specific interpretation of the structural and generative contra­
diction of aesthetic ‘form’. It is, in this case, the determination of
art qua form and self-formation of life that is valorized. The starting
point, Schillers notion of the aesthetic education o f man, constitutes
an unsurpassable reference point. It is this notion that established the
idea that domination and servitude are, in the first place, part of an
ontological distribution (the activity of thought versus the passivity of
sensible matter). It is also this notion that defined a neutral state, a state
of dual cancellation, where the activity of thought and sensible recep­
tivity become a single reality. They constitute a sort of new region of
being - the region of free play and appearance - that makes it possible
to conceive of the equality whose direct materialization, according to
Schiller, was shown to be impossible by the French Revolution. It is this
specific mode of living in the sensible world that must be developed by
‘aesthetic education [40] in order to train men susceptible to live in
a free political community. The idea of modernity as a time devoted
to the material realization of a humanity still latent in mankind
was constructed on this foundation. It can be said, regarding this
point, that the ‘aesthetic revolution produced a new idea of political
revolution: the material realization of a common humanity still only
existing as an idea. This is how Schillers ‘aesthetic state’ became
the ‘aesthetic programme’ of German Romanticism, the programme
summarized in the rough draft written together by Hegel, Hölderlin,
and Schelling: the material realization of unconditional freedom and
pure thought in common forms of life and belief. It is this paradigm of
aesthetic autonomy that became the new paradigm for revolution, and
it subsequently allowed for the brief but decisive encounter between
the artisans of the Marxist revolution and the artisans of forms for a
new way of life. The failure of this revolution determined the destiny
- in two phases - of modernatism. At first, artistic modernatism, in
its authentic revolutionary potential for [41] hope and defiance, was
set against the degeneration of political revolution. Surrealism and
the Frankfurt School were the principal vehicles for this counter­
modernity. The failure of political revolution was later conceived of as
the failure of its ontologico-aesthetic model. Modernity thus became
something like a fatal destiny based on a fundamental forgetting:
the essence of technology according to Heidegger, the revolutionary
severing of the kings head as a severing of tradition in the history of
humanity, and finally the original sin of human beings, forgetful of
their debt to the Other and of their submission to the heterogeneous
powers of the sensible.
What is called postmodernism is really the process of this reversal. At
first, postmodernism brought to light everything in the recent evolution
of the arts and possible ways of thinking the arts that destroyed modern­
ism’s theoretical edifice: the crossing-over and mixture between the
arts that destroyed Lessings conventional set of principles concerning
the separation of the arts; the collapse of the paradigm of functionalist
architecture and the return of the curved line and embellishment; the
breakdown of the pictorial/two-dimensional/abstract model through
the return of figurative representation and [42] signification as well as
the slow invasion of paintings exhibition-space by three-dimensional
and narrative forms, from Pop Art to installation art and ‘rooms’ for
video art;8 the new combinations of painting and language as well as
of monumental sculpture and the projection of shadows and lights; the
break-up of the serial tradition through new mixtures between musical
systems, genres, and epochs. The teleological model of modernity
became untenable at the same time as its divisions between the
‘distinctive features’ of the different arts, or the separation of a pure
domain of art. Postmodernism, in a sense, was simply the name under
whose guise certain artists and thinkers realized what modernism had
been: a desperate attempt to establish a ‘distinctive feature of art’ by
linking it to a simple teleology of historical evolution and rupture.
There was not really a need, moreover, to make this late recognition
of a fundamental fact of the aesthetic regime of the arts into an actual
temporal break, the real end of a historical period.
However, it was precisely the next episode that showed that postmod­
ernism was more than this. The joyful, postmodern artistic license, its
[43] exaltation of the carnival of simulacra, all sorts of interbreeding
and hybridization, transformed very quickly and came to challenge
the freedom or autonomy that the modernatist principle conferred - or
would have conferred - upon art the mission of accomplishing. There
was thus a return from the carnival to the primal scene. However, the
primal scene can be taken in two senses, either as the starting point of a
 process or as an original separation. Modernist faith had latched on to
the idea of the ‘aesthetic education of man’ that Schiller had extracted
from the Kantian analytic of the beautiful. The postmodern reversal
had as its theoretical foundation Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian
sublime, which was reinterpreted as the scene of a founding distance
separating the idea from any sensible presentation. From this moment
onward, postmodernism came into harmony with the mourning and
repenting of modernatist thought, and the scene of sublime distance
came to epitomize all sorts of scenes of original distance or original
sin: the Heideggerian flight of the gods, the irreducible aspect of
the unsymbolizable object and the death drive as analysed by Freud,
the voice of the Absolutely Other declaring a ban on representation,
the revolutionary murder of the Father. Postmodernism thus became
the grand threnody of the unrepresentable/intractable [44] /irredeemable,
denouncing the modern madness of the idea of a self-emancipation of
mankinds humanity and its inevitable and interminable culmination
in the death camps.
The notion of the avant-garde defines the type of subject suitable
to the modernist vision and appropriate, according to this vision,
for connecting the aesthetic to the political. Its success is due less to
the convenient connection it proposes between the artistic idea of
innovation and the idea of politically-guided change, than to the more
covert connection it establishes between two ideas of the avant-garde’.
On the one hand, there is the topographical and military notion of the
force that marches in the lead, that has a clear understanding of the
movement, embodies its forces, determines the direction of historical
evolution, and chooses subjective political orientations.9 In short, there
is the idea that links political subjectivity to a certain form: the party,
an advanced detachment that derives its ability to lead from its ability
to read and interpret the signs of history. On the other hand, there
is another idea of the avant-garde that, in accordance with Schiller’s
model, is rooted in the aesthetic anticipation of the future. If the
concept of the avant-garde has any meaning in the aesthetic regime of
the arts, it is on this side of things, not on the side of the [45] advanced
detachments of artistic innovation but on the side of the invention of
sensible forms and material structures for a life to come. This is what
the ‘aesthetic’ avant-garde brought to the ‘political’ avant-garde, or
what it wanted to bring to it - and what it believed to have brought to
it - by transforming politics into a total life programme. The history of
the relations between political parties and aesthetic movements is first
of all the history of a confusion, sometimes complacently maintained,,
at other times violently denounced, between these two ideas of the
avant-garde, which are in fact two different ideas of political subjec­
tivity: the archi-political idea of a party, that is to say the idea of a
form of political intelligence that sums up the essential conditions for
change, and the meta-political idea of global political subjectivity, the
idea of the potentiality inherent in the innovative sensible modes of
experience that anticipate a community to come. There is, however,
nothing accidental about this confusion. It is not the case, as today’s
doxa would have us believe, that artists’ ambitious claims to a total
revolution of the sensible paved the way for totalitarianism. It is rather
that the very idea of a political avant-garde is divided between the
strategic conception and the aesthetic conception of the avant-garde.
[46]
 Mechanical Arts and the Promotion o f
the Anonymous
In one o f you r texts, you establish a connection between the developm ent o f
photography and film as ‘m echanical’ arts and the birth o f'n ew history'.10
Can yo u explain this connection? Does it correspond to Benjam ins idea
that the masses as such acquired visibility at the beginning o f the century
with the help o f the ‘m echanical’ arts?

Perhaps first I should clear up a misunderstanding concerning the notion

of mechanical arts’. The connection I established was between a scien­
tific paradigm and an aesthetic paradigm. Benjamin’s thesis presupposes
something different, which seems questionable to me: the deduction of
the aesthetic and political properties of a form of art from its technical
properties. Mechanical arts, qua mechanical arts, would result in a change
of artistic paradigm and a new relationship between art and [47] its
subject matter. This proposition refers back to one of modernism’s main
theses: the difference between the arts is linked to the difference between
their technological conditions or their specific medium or material.
This assimilation can be understood either in the simple modernist
mode, or in accordance with modernatist hyperbole. The persistent
success of Benjamin’s theses on art in the age of mechanical repro­
duction is, moreover, undoubtedly due to the crossing-over they allow
for between the categories of Marxist materialist explanation and those
of Heideggerian ontology, which ascribe the age of modernity to the
unfurling of the essence of technology. This link between the aesthetic
and the onto-technological has, in fact, been subjected to the general fate
of modernist categories. In Benjamin, Duchamp, or Rodchenko’s time,
it coexisted with the faith in the capabilities of electricity and machines,
iron, glass, and concrete. With the so-called ‘postmodern’ reversal, it has
kept pace with the return to the icon, which presents the veil of Veronica
as the essence of painting, film, or photography.
 It is thus necessary, in my opinion, to take things the other way
around. In order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility
on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, they [48] first
need to be recognized as arts. That is to say that they first need to be,
put into practice and recognized as something other than techniques
of reproduction or transmission. It is thus the same principle that
confers visibility on absolutely anyone and allows for photography and
film to become arts. We can even reverse the formula: it is because the
anonymous became the subject matter of art that the act of recording
such a subject matter can be an art. The fact that what is anonymous
is not only susceptible to becoming the subject matter of art but also
conveys a specific beauty is an exclusive characteristic of the aesthetic
regime of the arts. Not only did the aesthetic regime begin well before
the arts of mechanical reproduction, but it is actually this regime that
made them possible by its new way of thinking art and its subject
matter.
The aesthetic regime of the arts was initially the breakdown of the
system of representation, that is to say of a system where the dignity
of the subject matter dictated the dignity of genres of representation
(tragedy for the nobles, comedy for the people of meagre means;
historical painting versus genre painting; etc.). Along with genres,
the system of representation defined the situations and forms of
expression that were appropriate for' the lowliness or loftiness of the
subject matter. The aesthetic regime [49] of the arts dismantled this
correlation between subject matter and mode of representation. This
revolution first took place in literature: an epoch and a society were
deciphered through the features, clothes, or gestures of an ordinary
individual (Balzac); the sewer revealed a civilization (Hugo); the
daughter of a farmer and the daughter of a banker were caught in the
equal force of style as an ‘absolute manner of seeing things’ (Flaubert).
All of these forms of cancellation or reversal of the opposition between
high and low not only antedate the powers of mechanical repro­
duction, they made it possible for this reproduction to be more than
mechanical reproduction. In order for a technological mode of action
and production, i.e. a way of doing and making, to be qualified as
falling within the domain of art - be it a certain use of words or of
a camera - , it is first necessary for its subject matter to be defined as
 such. Photography was not established as an art on the grounds of its
technological nature. The discourse on the originality of photography
as an ‘indexical’ art is very recent, and it is less a part of the history of
photography than of the history of the postmodern reversal touched
upon above.11 Furthermore, photography did not become an art by
imitating the mannerisms of art. Benjamin accurately demonstrated
this regarding [50] David Octavius Hill: it is with the little anonymous
fishwife from New Haven, not with his grand pictorial compositions,
that he brought photography into the world of art. Likewise, it is not
the ethereal subject matter and soft focus of pictorialism that secured
the status of photographic art, it is rather the appropriation of the
commonplace: the emigrants in Stieglitz’s The Steerage, the frontal
portraits by Paul Strand or Walker Evans.12 On the one hand, the
technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the
other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour
acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before
being photographic or cinematic.
We should add that the honour conferred on the commonplace
is part of the science of literature before being part of the science of
history. Film and photography did not determine the subject matter
and modes of focalization of new history’. On the contrary, the new
science of history and the arts of mechanical reproduction are inscribed
in the same logic of aesthetic revolution. This programme is literary
before being scientific: it shifts the focus from great names and events
to the life of the anonymous; it finds symptoms of an epoch, a society,
or a civilization in the minute details of ordinary life [51]; it explains
the surface by subterranean layers; and it reconstructs worlds from
their vestiges. This does not simply mean that the science of history
has a literary prehistory. Literature itself was constituted as a kind of
symptomatology of society, and it set this symptomatology in contrast
with the clamour and imagination of the public stage. In his preface to
Cromwell, Hugo called for a literature based on the story of the customs
of everyday life that would be opposed to the story of events practised
by historians. In War a nd Peace, Tolstoy contrasted the documents of
literature, taken from narratives and testimonial accounts of the action
of innumerable anonymous actors, with the documents of historians,
taken from the archives - and from the imagination - of those who
believe to have been in charge of battles and to have made history.
Scholarly history took over this opposition when it contrasted the
history of the lifestyles of the masses and the cycles of material life
based on reading and interpreting mute witnesses’ with the former,
history of princes, battles, and treaties based on courts’ chronicles and
diplomatic reports. The appearance of the masses [52] on the scene of
history or in new’ images is not to be confused with the link between
the age of the masses and the age of science and technology. It is
first and foremost rooted in the aesthetic logic of a mode of visibility
that, on the one hand, revokes the representative tradition’s scales
of grandeur and, on the other hand, revokes the oratorical model of
speech in favour of the interpretation of signs on the body of people,
things, and civilizations.13
This is what scholarly history inherited. However, its intention was
to separate the condition of its new object (the life of the anonymous)
from its literary origin and from the politics of literature in which it
is inscribed. What it cast aside - which was reappropriated by film
and photography - was the logic revealed by the tradition of the novel
(from Balzac to Proust and Surrealism) and the reflection on the true
that Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and the tradition of ‘critical thought’
inherited: the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And
the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness
in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric
figure. This phantasmagoric dimension of the true, which belongs to
the aesthetic regime of the arts, played an essential role in the formation
of the critical paradigm of the human and social sciences. [53] The
Marxist theory of fetishism is the most striking testimony to this fact:
commodities must be torn out of their trivial appearances, made into
phantasmagoric objects in order to be interpreted as the expression of
society’s contradictions. Scholarly history tried to separate out various
features within the aesthetico-political configuration that gave it its
object. It flattened this phantasmagoria of the true into the positivist
sociological concepts of mentality/expression and belief/ignorance.
[54]
 Is History a Form o f Fiction?lA
You refer to the idea o f fiction as essentially belonging to the domain o f
em pirical reality. How exactly is this to be understood? What are the
connections between the History we are ‘in volved ’ in and the stories told
(or deconstructed) by the narrative arts? And how are w e to make sense o f
the fa ct that p oetic or literary locutions ‘take shape\ have real effects, rather
than being reflections o f the real? Are the concepts o f ‘p olitical bodies’ or
a ‘c om m unal body m ore than metaphors? Does this reflection involve a
redefinition o f utopia?

There are two problems here that certain people confuse in order to
construct the phantom of a historical reality that would solely be made
up of ‘fictions’. The first problem concerns the relationship between
history and historicity, that is to say the relationship of the historical
agent to the speaking being. The second problem concerns the idea
of fiction and the relationship between [55] fictional rationality and
the modes of explanation used for historical and social reality, the
relationship between the logic of fiction and the logic of facts.
It is preferable to begin with the second problem, the ‘actuality’ of
fiction analysed by the text you refer to.15 This actuality itself raises
a twofold question: the general question of fiction’s rationality, i.e.
the distinction between fiction and falsity, and the question of the
distinction - or the indistinction - between the modes of intelligibility
specific to the construction of stories and the modes of intelligibility
used for understanding historical phenomena. Let’s start from the
beginning. The specificity of the representative regime of the arts is
characterized by the separation between the idea of fiction and that of
lies. It is this regime that confers autonomy on the arts’ various forms in
relationship to the economy of communal occupations and the counter­
economy of simulacra specific to the ethical regime of images. This is
what is essentially at stake in Aristotle’s Poetics, which safeguards the
forms of poetic mimesis from the Platonic suspicion concerning what
 images consist of and their end or purpose. The Poetics declares that
the arrangement of a poem’s actions is not equivalent to the fabrication
of a simulacrum.16 It is a play of [56] knowledge that is carried out in
a determined space-time. To pretend is not to put forth illusions but,
to elaborate intelligible structures. Poetry owes no explanation for the
‘truth’ of what it says because, in its very principle, it is not made up of
images or statements, but fictions, that is to say arrangements between
actions. The other consequence that Aristotle derives from this is the
superiority of poetry, which confers a causal logic on the arrangement
of events, over history, condemned to presenting events according
to their empirical disorder. In other words - and this is obviously
something that historians do not like to examine too closely - the clear
division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history
impossible as well as a science of history.
The aesthetic revolution rearranges the rules of the game by making
two things interdependent: the blurring of the borders between the
logic of facts and the logic of fictions an d the new mode of rationality
that characterizes the science of history. By declaring that the principle
of poetry is not to be found in fiction but in a certain arrangement of
the signs of language, the Romantic Age blurred the dividing line that
isolated art from the jurisdiction of statements or images, as well as
the dividing line that separated the [57] logic of facts from the logic of
stories. It is not the case, as is sometimes said, that it consecrated the
‘autotelism’ of language, separated from reality. It is the exact opposite.
The Romantic Age actually plunged language into the materiality of
the traits by which the historical and social world becomes visible to
itself, be it in the form of the silent language of things or the coded
language of images. Circulation within this landscape of signs defines,
moreover, the new fictionality, the new way of telling stories, which
is first of all a way of assigning meaning to the ‘empirical’ world of
lowly actions and commonplace objects. Fictional arrangement is
no longer identified with the Aristotelian causal sequence of actions
‘according to necessity and plausibility’. It is an arrangement of signs.
However, this literary arrangement of signs is by no means the solitary
self-referentiality of language. It is the identification of modes of
fictional construction with means of deciphering the signs inscribed
in the general aspect of a place, a group, a wall, an article of clothing,
 a face. It is the association between, on the one hand, accelerations or
decelerations of language, its shuffling of images or sudden changes of
tone, all its differences of potential between the insignificant and the
overly significant or overly meaningful [58], and on the other hand, the
modalities of a trip through the landscape of significant traits deposited
in the topography of spaces, the physiology of social circles, the silent
expression of bodies. The ‘fictionality’ specific to the aesthetic age is
consequently distributed between two poles: the potential of meaning
inherent in everything silent and the proliferation of modes of speech
and levels of meaning.
The aesthetic sovereignty of literature does not therefore amount to
the reign of fiction. On the contrary, it is a regime in which the logic
of descriptive and narrative arrangements in fiction becomes funda­
mentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and
interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world.
When Balzac places his reader before the entwined hieroglyphics on
the tottering and heteroclite façade of the house in At the Sign o f the Cat
and Racket, or has his reader enter an antique dealers shop, with the
hero of The M agic Skin,17 where jumbled up together are objects both
profane and sacred, uncivilized and cultured, antique and modern,
that each sum up a world, when he makes Cuvier the true poet recon­
structing a world from a fossil, he establishes a regime of equivalence
between the signs of the new novel and those of the description or [59]
interpretation of the phenomena of a civilization. He forges this new
rationality of the obvious and the obscure that goes against the grand
Aristotelian arrangements and that would become the new rationality
for the history of material life (which stands in opposition to the
histories of great names and events).
The Aristotelian dividing line between two ‘stories’ or ‘histories’
- poets’ stories and the history of historians - is thereby revoked,
the dividing line that not only separated reality and fiction but also
empirical succession and constructed necessity. Aristotle established
the superiority of poetry, recounting ‘what could happen’ according
to the necessity or plausibility of the poetic arrangement of actions,
over history, conceived of as the empirical succession of events, of
‘what happened’. The aesthetic revolution drastically disrupts things:
testimony and fiction come under the same regime of meaning. On
the one hand, the ‘empirical’ bears the marks of the true in the form
of traces and imprints. ‘What happened’ thus comes directly under a
regime of truth, a regime that demonstrates the necessity behind what
happened. On the other hand, ‘what could happen’ no longer has the
autonomous and linear form [60] of the arrangement of actions. The
poetic ‘story’ or ‘history’ henceforth links the realism that shows us
the poetic traces inscribed directly in reality with the artificialism that
assembles complex machines of understanding.
This connection was transferred from literature to the new art
of narrative, film, which brought to its highest potential the double
resource of the silent imprint that speaks and the montage that calcu­
lates the values of truth and the potential for producing meaning.
Documentary film, film devoted to the ‘real’, is in this sense capable
of greater fictional invention than ‘fiction’ film, readily devoted to a
certain stereotype of actions and characters. Chris Marker’s Le Tombeau
d ’A lexandre (The Last Bolshevik), the object of the article you refer to,
fictionalizes the history of Russia from the time of the czars to the post­
communist period through the destiny of a film-maker, Alexander
Medvedkin. Marker does not make him into a fictional character; he
does not tell fabricated stories about the USSR. He plays off of the
combination of different types of traces (interviews, significant faces,
archival documents, extracts from documentary and fictional films,
etc.) in order to suggest possibilities for thinking [61] this story or
history. The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. This
proposition should be distinguished from any discourse - positive or
negative - according to which everything is ‘narrative’, with alterna­
tions between ‘grand’ narratives and ‘minor’ narratives. The notion
of ‘narrative’ locks us into oppositions between the real and artifice
where both the positivists and the deconstructionists are lost. It is not
a matter of claiming that everything is fiction. It is a matter of stating
that the fiction of the aesthetic age defined models for connecting
the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the
border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction. Moreover,
these models were taken up by historians and analysts of social reality.
Writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of
truth. This has nothing whatsoever to do with a thesis on the reality
or unreality of things. On the contrary, it is clear that a model for the
 fabrication of stories is linked to a certain idea of history as common
destiny, with an idea of those who make history’, and that this inter­
penetration of the logic of facts and the logic of stories is specific to an
age when anyone and everyone is considered to be participating in the
task of ‘making’ history. Thus, it is not a matter of claiming that [62]
‘History’ is only made up of stories that we tell ourselves, but simply
that the ‘logic of stories’ and the ability to act as historical agents go
together. Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions’,
that is to say m aterial rearrangements of signs and images, relationships
between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what
can be done.
It is here that we encounter the other question that you asked, which
concerns the relationship between literarity and historicity. Political
statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality. They
define models of speech or action but also regimes of sensible intensity.
They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the
sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and
modes of doing and making. They define variations of sensible inten­
sities, perceptions, and the abilities of bodies.18 They thereby take hold
of unspecified groups of people, they widen gaps, open up space for
deviations, modify the speeds, the trajectories, and the ways in which
groups of people adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize
their images. They reconfigure the map of the sensible by interfering
with the functionality of gestures and rhythms [63] adapted to the
natural cycles of production, reproduction, and submission. Man is
a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be
diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words. This liter­
arity is at once the condition and the effect of the circulation of‘actual’
literary locutions. However, these locutions take hold of bodies and
divert them from their end or purpose insofar as they are not bodies in
the sense of organisms, but quasi-bodies, blocks of speech circulating
without a legitimate father to accompany them toward their authorized
addressee. Therefore, they do not produce collective bodies. Instead,
they introduce lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary
collective bodies. This has always been, as is well known, the phobia of
those in power and the theoreticians of good government, worried that
the circulation of writing would produce ‘disorder in the established
 system of classification. It was also, in the nineteenth century, the
phobia o f‘actual5writers who wrote in order to denounce the literarity
that overflows the institution of literature and leads its products astray.
It is true that the circulation of these quasi-bodies causes modifica­
tions in the sensory perception of what is common to the community,
in the relationship [64] between what is common to language and the
sensible distribution of spaces and occupations. They form, in this way,
uncertain communities that contribute to the formation of enunciative
collectives that call into question the distribution of roles, territories,
and languages. In short, they contribute to the formation of political
subjects that challenge the given distribution of the sensible. A political
collective is not, in actual fact, an organism or a communal body.
The channels for political subjectivization are not those of imaginary
identification but those of ‘literary’ disincorporation.19
I am not sure that the notion of utopia takes this into account. It is
a word whose definitional capabilities have been completely devoured
by its connotative properties. Sometimes it refers to the mad delusions
that lead to totalitarian catastrophe; sometimes it refers, conversely, to
the infinite expansion of the field of possibility that resists all forms of
totalizing closure. From the point of view that concerns us here, i.e. the
point of view of the reconfigurations of the shared sensible order, the
word utopia harbours two contradictory meanings. Utopia is, in one
respect, the unacceptable, a no-place, the extreme point of a polemical
reconfiguration of the sensible, which breaks down the categories
that define what is considered to be obvious. However, it is also the
configuration of a proper place, a [65] non-polemical distribution of
the sensible universe where what one sees, what one says, and what one
makes or does are rigorously adapted to one another. Utopias and forms
of utopian socialism functioned based on this ambiguity. On the one
hand, they dismissed the obvious sensible facts in which the normality
of domination is rooted. On the other hand, they proposed a state
of affairs where the idea of the community would have its adequate
forms of incorporation, a state of affairs that would therefore abolish
the dispute concerning the relations of words to things that makes
up the heart of politics. In The Nights o f Labor, I analysed from this
perspective the complex encounter between workers and the engineers
of utopia. What the Saint-Simonian engineers proposed was a new, real
body for the community where the water and rail routes marked out
on the ground would take the place of paper dreams and the illusions
of speech. The workers, for their part, did not set practice in contrast
with utopia; they conferred upon the latter the characteristic of being
‘unreal’, of being a montage of words and images appropriate for recon­
figuring the territory of the visible, the thinkable, and the possible.
The ‘fictions’ of art and politics are therefore heterotopias rather than
utopias. [66]
 On Art and Work20
The link between artistic practice and its apparent outside, i.e. work, «
essential to the hypothesis o f a ‘f a ctory o f the sensible. How do you yo u rself
conceive o f such a link (exclusion, distinction, in differen ce...)? Is it possible
to speak o f ‘human activity’ in general and include artistic practices within
it y or are these exceptions when com p a red to other practices?

The first possible meaning of the notion of a ‘factory of the sensible’

is the formation of a shared sensible world, a common habitat, by the
weaving together of a plurality of human activities. However, the idea
of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ implies something more. A ‘common’
world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the
sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a
polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in [67] a
space of possibilities. It is from this perspective that it is possible to
raise the question of the relationship between the ‘ordinariness’ of work
and artistic ‘exceptionality’. Here again referencing Plato can help lay
down the terms of the problem. In the third book of the Republic,
the mimetician is no longer condemned simply for the falsity and the
pernicious nature of the images he presents, but he is condemned in
accordance with a principle of division of labour that was already used
to exclude artisans from any shared political space: the mimetician is,
by definition, a double being. He does two things at once, whereas the
principle of a well-organized community is that each person only does
the one thing that they were destined to do by their ‘nature’. In one
sense, this statement says everything: the idea of work is not initially
the idea of a determined activity, a process of material transformation.
It is the idea of a distribution of the sensible: an impossibility of doing
‘something else’ based on an ‘absence of time’. This ‘impossibility’ is
part of the incorporated conception of the community. It establishes
work as the necessary relegation of the worker to the private space-time
of his occupation, his exclusion from participation in what is common
to the community.21 The mimetician brings confusion to [68] this
distribution: he is a man of duplication, a worker who does two things
at once. Perhaps the correlate to this principle is the most important
thing: the mimetician provides a public stage for the ‘private’ principle
of work. He sets up a stage for what is common to the community
with what should determine the confinement of each person to his or
her place. It is this redistribution of the sensible that constitutes his
noxiousness, even more than the danger of simulacra weakening souls.
Hence, artistic practice is not the outside of work but its displaced
form of visibility. The democratic distribution of the sensible makes
the worker into a double being. It removes the artisan from ‘his’ place,
the domestic space of work, and gives him ‘time’ to occupy the space
of public discussions and take on the identity of a deliberative citizen.
The mimetic act of splitting in two, which is at work in theatrical
space, consecrates this duality and makes it visible. The exclusion of
the mimetician, from the Platonic point of view, goes hand in hand
with the formation of a community where work is in ‘its’ place.
The principle of fiction that governs the representative regime of art
is a way of stabilizing the artistic exception, of assigning it to a techrn,
which means two things: the art of imitations is a technique and not
a lie. It ceases to be [69] a simulacrum, but at the same time it ceases
to be the displaced visibility of work, as a distribution of the sensible.
The imitator is no longer the double being against whom it is necessary
to posit the city where each person only does a single thing. The art of
imitations is able to inscribe its specific hierarchies and exclusions in
the major distribution of the liberal arts and the mechanical arts.
The aesthetic regime of the arts disrupts this apportionment of
spaces. It does not simply call into question mimetic division - i.e. the
mimetic act of splitting in two - in favour of an immanence of thought
in sensible matter. It also calls into question the neutralized status of
technë, the idea of technique as the imposition of a form of thought
on inert matter. That is to say that it brings to light, once again, the
distribution of occupations that upholds the apportionment of domains
of activity. This theoretical and political operation is at the heart
of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education o f Man. Behind the
Kantian definition of aesthetic judgement as a judgement without
concepts - without the submission of the intuitive given to conceptual
 determination - , Schiller indicates the political distribution that is
the matter at stake: the division between those who act and those
who are acted upon, between the cultivated classes [70] that have
access to a totalization of lived experience and the uncivilized classes
immersed in the parcelling out of work and of sensory experience.
Schillers ‘aesthetic’ state, by suspending the opposition between active
understanding and passive sensibility, aims at breaking down - with
an idea of art - an idea of society based on the opposition between
those who think and decide and those who are doomed to material
tasks.
In the nineteenth century, this suspension of work’s negative value
became the assertion of its positive value as the very form of the shared
effectivity of thought and community. This mutation occurred via
the transformation of the suspension inherent in the aesthetic state’
into the positive assertion of the aesthetic w ill. Romanticism declared
that the becoming-sensible of all thought and the becoming-thought
of all sensible materiality was the very goal of the activity of thought
in general. In this way, art once again became a symbol of work. It
anticipates the end - the elimination of oppositions - that work is not
yet in a position to attain by and for itself. However, it does this insofar
as it is a production, the identification of a process of material execution
with a community’s self-presentation of its meaning. Production
asserts itself [71] as the principle behind a new distribution of the
sensible insofar as it unites, in one and the same concept, terms that
are traditionally opposed: the activity of manufacturing and visibility.
Manufacturing meant inhabiting the private and lowly space-time
of labour for sustenance. Producing unites the act of manufacturing
with the act of bringing to light, the act of defining a new relationship
between making and seeing. Art anticipates work because it carries out
its principle: the transformation of sensible matter into the commu­
nity’s self-presentation. The texts written by the young Marx that
confer upon work the status of the generic essence of mankind were
only possible on the basis of German Idealism’s aesthetic programme,
i.e. art as the transformation of thought into the sensory experience of
the community. It is this initial programme, moreover, that laid the
foundation for the thought and practice of the avant-gardes’ in the
1920s: abolish art as a separate activity, put it back to work, that is to
say, give it back to life and its activity of working out its own proper
meaning.
I do not mean by this that the modern valorization of work is only
the result of the new way for thinking about art. On the one hand,
the aesthetic mode of thought is much more than a way of thinking
about art. It is an idea of thought, linked to an idea of the distribution
[72] of the sensible. On the other hand, it is also necessary to think
about the way in which artists’ art found itself defined on the basis of
a twofold promotion of work: the economic promotion of work as the
name for the fundamental human activity, but also the struggles of the
proletariat to bring labour out of the night surrounding it, out of its
exclusion from shared visibility and speech. It is necessary to abandon
the lazy and absurd schema that contrasts the aesthetic cult of art for
art’s sake with the rising power of industrial labour. Art can show signs
of being an exclusive activity insofar as it is work. Better informed than
the demystifiers of the twentieth century, the critics in Flaubert’s time
indicated what links the cult of the sentence to the valorization of work,
said to be wordless: the Flaubertian aesthete is a pebble breaker. At the
time of the Russian Revolution, art and production would be identified
because they came under one and the same principle concerning the
redistribution of the sensible, they came under one and the same
virtue of action that opens up a form of visibility at the same time as
it manufactures objects. The cult of art presupposes a revalorization of
the abilities attached to the very idea of work. However, this idea is less
the discovery of the essence of human activity than a recomposition
of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the [73] relationship
between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying. Whatever might be
the specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic practices
are not exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure
the distribution of these activities.
 Notes
1 Without excessively multiplying the examples, it is worth
highlighting the unique logic of translation operative in the work
of the French belles infidèles in the seventeenth century. They
brazenly adapted les Anciens to the poetic norms of les M odernes
and often changed what were seen to be the inadequacies of the
original work (including anything from vocabulary and stylistics
to plot structure and organization, which sometimes necessitated
significant omissions). It is a grave but nonetheless common
mistake to impose a teleological model on the history of trans­
lation, denigrating the belles infidèles and extolling the scientific
superiority of contemporary translation practice, which began
approximately with the Romantics. The logic of signification at
work in specific historical communities cannot be readily trans­
lated into one single overarching logic of meaning that would
define the trans-historical nature of translation. For more on the
history of translation, see the work of Antoine Berman, Henri
Meschonnic, George Steiner, and Henri Van Hoof.
2 I am not arguing in favour of what Schleiermacher referred to as a
method of translation that brings the author toward the reader. I
am pragmatically advocating the use of a relational logic of signi­
fication in a specific socio-historic situation and with a particular
type of disourse.
3 An earlier, abbreviated version of this essay appeared in the
Encyclopedia o f M odern French Thought (New York and London:
Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004).
4 The numbers in square brackets refer to the pagination of the
original French edition (Paris : La Fabrique - Editions, 2000) and
correspond to the beginning of each page indicated. - Trans.
5 Le comm un - alternately translated as ‘something in common,
‘something common, ‘what is common’, or ‘what is common to
the community’ - is strictly speaking what makes or produces
 a community and not simply an attribute shared by all of its
members. The adjectival form of the same word, com m un, is
translated as ‘common, ‘shared’, or ‘communal’ depending on the
context. - Trans.
6 Rancière uses the word ‘poem’ (lepoèm e) in reference to the Greek
term poiëm a, which means ‘anything made or done’ as well as
‘a piece of craftsmanship’, ‘a poetic work’, or ‘an act or deed’.
He also sometimes prefers ‘the stage’ (la scène) over ‘theatre’ or
‘drama’ (le théâtre), undoubtedly in order to emphasize the public
aspect of theatrical performances on the skënë. - Trans.
7 From this perspective, it is possible to understand the paralogism
inherent in all of the attempts to deduce the characteristics of
the arts from the ontological status of images (for example, the
incessant attempts to derive the idea of the ‘distinctive feature’
of painting, photography, or film from the theology of the icon).
This attempt establishes a relationship of cause and effect between
properties of two regimes of thought that are mutually exclusive.
The same problem is raised by Benjamin’s analysis of the aura
insofar as he establishes a questionable deduction from the ritual
value of the image to the value of the unicity of the work of art:
‘It is a fact of decisive importance that the existence of the work
of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its
ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic”
work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use
value’ (‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’.
Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Harry Zohn, trans. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968, p. 225 [translation slightly
modified in order to maintain an overall coherence between the
quotation and Rancière’s commentary - Trans.]). This ‘fact’ is in
reality only the problematic adaptation between two schemata of
transformation: the historicizing schema of the ‘secularization of
the sacred’ and the economic schema of the transformation of use
value into exchange value. However, when sacred service defines
the purpose of the statue or painting as images, the very idea of a
specificity of art and of a property of unicity inherent in its ‘works’
cannot come to light. The erasure of the former is necessary for
the emergence of the latter. It by no means follows that the idea
 of arts specificity is an altered form of the definition of images
by sacred service. The £in other words’ assumes two propositions
to be equivalent that are not in the least and allows for all of the
crossing-over between the materialist explanation of art and its
transformation into secular theology. This is how Benjamins
theorization of the transition from cult value to exhibition value
today supports three competing discourses: the discourse that
celebrates the modern demystification of artistic mysticism, the
discourse that endows the work of art and its exhibition-space
with the sacred values of the representation of the invisible,
and the discourse that contrasts the buried ages when the gods
were still present with the age of abandonment, the age of mans
£being-exposed’.
8 Cf. Raymond Bellour. £La chambre’. LEntre-images 2. Paris:
P.O.L., 1999. 281-317.
9 'Subjective’ here refers to the political process o f‘subjectivization’
as it is explained in Appendix 1. - Trans.
10 ‘L’inoubliable’. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jacques Rancière. Arrêt
sur histoire. Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1997. 47-70.
11 The anti-modernist, polemical vocation of this late discovery
of the ‘origin’ of photography, modelled on the myth of the
invention of painting by Dibutades, clearly appears in the work
of Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida) as well as in the work of
Rosalind Krauss (Le Photographique).
12 Rancière uses ‘the commonplace’ (le quelconque) to refer to both
the ordinary and everyday as well as to the insignificant, i.e. the
mass of anonymous objects or people that lack any specific quality
or value. - Trans.
13 Here as elsewhere, Rancière uses the word ‘body’ (le corps) in the
largest possible sense of the term in order to refer alternately - and
sometimes simultaneously —to physical forms (anything from the
bodies of human beings to objects or buildings), communities
(social bodies), political configurations (the body politic), units
of discourse (bodies of writing), and even geographic formations
(bodies of land and water). - Trans.
14 The French term histoire means both ‘history’ and ‘story’. Although
the context often provides clear indications for deciding between
 these two alternatives, Rancière occasionally plays off of the
ambiguity in French (rendered in English as ‘history or story’).
- Trans.
15 Jacques Rancière. £La fiction de mémoire: à propos du Tombeau
d ’A lexandre de Chris Marker’. Trafic 29 (Spring 1999): 36-47.
[A revised version of this article was later published as a chapter
in La Fable ciném atographique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001.
201-16). An English translation of this work is forthcoming.
- Trans.]
16 On Rancière’s use of the word £poem’, see note 6. Rancière uses
the term ‘poetry’ (la poésie) in the following pages to refer to the
Greek term poiësis, which means £the art of poetry’ or £a poem’ as
well as £a making, a forming, a creating’. - Trans.
17 Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin has also been translated into English
as The Wild Ass’s Skin. - Trans.
18 On Rancière’s use of the term £body’, see note 13. - Trans.
19 Regarding this issue, I take the liberty of referring the reader to my
book, The Names o f History: On the Poetics o f K nowledge (Hassan
Melehy, trans. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press,
1994).
20 Rancière is concerned with the relationship between l ’a rt et le
travail in this chapter. The general term work’ was appropriate in
most cases as a translation of le travail. However, certain contexts
and expressions required using 'labour’ to translate the same term
in French. - Trans.
21 On Rancière’s notion of le com m un, see note 5. - Trans.
22 This interview was originally conducted in French on October
18th, 2003 and was later reviewed by Jacques Rancière. - Trans. *
23 The Names o f History: On the Poetics o f Knowledge. Hassan Melehy,
trans. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1994, p. 52 (Les Mots de l ’histoire. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992,
p. 109). Translation slightly modified. - Trans.
24 On Rancière’s use of the word ‘poetry’, see note 16. - Trans.
25 Rimbaud’s Alchimie du verbe contains an implicit reference to
Lemaître de Sacy’s translation of the Gospel according to St.
John: Au com m encem ent était le Verbe'. The King James version
and other major English translations prefer to render logos as
 ‘Word’ (Ίη the beginning was the Word’), thereby leading to the
English translation of Rimbaud’s poem as ‘The Alchemy of the
Word’. For this reason, the term word’ has been used here as a
translation of "verbe.
26 Rancière frequently adopts the standard vocabulary of other
writers in order to implicitly reference their work instead of
making explicit references or using quotations. This type of lexical
appropriation can often be transferred directly into English due
to a similar network of intellectual or cultural connotations (for
instance, spectacle and spectacle both evoke, in certain contexts,
the work of Guy Debord). However, whereas désœuvrem ent
immediately conjures up the work of Maurice Blanchot in
French, Ann Smocks standard translation of this term as ‘inertia
does not have the same effect in English. Hence the decision
to supplement it with the term ‘non-work’ and add the present
commentary. - Trans.
27 Whereas the ‘plastic arts’ (sculpture, ceramics, etc.) are often
opposed to the art of drawing and painting in English, les arts
plastiques include any of the arts that elaborate concrete aesthetic
forms (sculpture, ceramics, architecture, drawing, painting, etc.).
The use of the term ‘plastic’, both here and elsewhere, refers to
this larger semantic field. - Trans.
28 ‘A child kills himself’. Short Voyages to the Land o f the People.
James B. Swenson, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003. 107-34. Europa J'51 was released in 1952 in the United
Kingdom as No Greater Love and in 1954 in the United States as
The Greatest Love. - Trans.
29 To avoid any confusion, it is worth noting that the French
tradition tends to translate John 3:8 (cto pneum a hopou thelei
p n ei) as ‘ ΓΕsprit souffle où il veu i, whereas the English translators
generally prefer something closer to ‘the wind blows where it
wills’. Pneuma refers equally to the wind and to spirit. - Trans.
30 Some of the information compiled in this bibliography is
dependent on databases and existing bibliographies that, on more
than one occasion, proved to be less reliable than one would hope.
For this reason, a concerted effort was made to directly consult
all of the works cited in order to correct any errors. Nevertheless,
 certain works were not available in the numerous libraries I have
at my disposal, and it was therefore occasionally necessary to rely
on bibliographical information from other sources. - Trans.
31 In selecting among the numerous articles published by Jacques
Rancière (he is a regular contributor to journals such as the
Cahiers du ciném a, Lignes, and Trafic), privilege was given to
major research publications and those articles that have been
translated into English. Many of Rancière’s early essays have
recently been collected in Les Scenes du peuple. - Trans.